Box Office Thread

Maybe it's not the best idea to alienate the people who watched the original in the first place.

Preach. I totally agree with you on that.

At the risk of exposing myself to spoilers, may I ask why you said that?

The closest I can get to a non-spoilery response: the direction the movie takes with Mako's character has been controversial.

Major spoilers: They killed off Raleigh in between the two movies, and fridged Mako partway into Pacific Rim Uprising. Considering that a lot of fans of the original liked Mako and regarded her as a good example of a well-written female character with her own non-romance-related arc, this did not go over well.

Also, they made one of the secondary characters from the original movie into the villain, which was not also not well recieved by some fans.

edited 31st Mar '18 11:50:49 AM by Galadriel

Everything I read about this movie makes me go "...Why?"

There is no sensible/logical decision whatsoever in the way that sequel was handled.

Looks like Ready Player One is doing more than fine with it's $50+ million Easter weekend and its $180 million worldwide release. Although Deadline has say it might make less than it's break even point which might be a problem, but with it's product placement, or rather franchise placement, I don't the film has worry about how much this movie makes.

http://deadline.com/2018/04/ready-player-one-steven-spielberg-opening-weekend-box-office-1202318581/

Also Black Panther has reached the $650 million mark and is still planning to take out Jurassic World and Titanic as 3rd highest grossing film domestically. I remember saying how Black Panther should make in the end about $610 or $635 if all the big March films end up either being disappointing or just bad. It's going to be impressive when before Infinity War gets released Disney will have made $750 million from just two films this year so far.

Also Uprising is looking to be a bust, after dropping 65% from last week, and I don't think China is going to warrant a sequel to this.

Overall, this March has been pretty disappointing compared to last year, and especially compared to the year before.

Do we have any indication of what Black Panther’s final worldwide gross will be?

So at this point it's entirely possible Black Panther's domestic total is gonna conquer Justice League's worldwide total. Yikes. Imagine telling that to a comic fan 20 years ago.

edited 1st Apr '18 12:12:07 PM by comicwriter

Fun fact: without the “preorders” BS Marvel keeps using to inflate their sales numbers, and counting by actual store customer purchases, “Black Panther” is Marvel’s highest selling comic of 2017.

God that page is huge.

I'm more surprised by how well Image is doing, especially how they're beating out Marvel in total sales.

I'm pretty sure this has been already mentioned, but man, Black Panther is the ONLY MCU film that has grossed over $1 billion worldwide that doesn't feature Iron Man. Yes, really, before this film every single MCU film over $1 billion featured Iron Man.

So here's the list of the 50 most profitable films of the last 5 years (not updated yet to include Black Panther, which will likely rank high).

So of note: Illumination has done extremely well, Disney has as well (duh), and the only DCEU movies to even place on the list are Wonder Woman and Suicide Squad (Zack Snyder's movies in particular have been incredibly expensive).

edited 4th Apr '18 11:55:08 AM by comicwriter

I find it hardly surprising, but still interesting that while Fast and Furious 6 and 7 made to Top 50, 8 didn't.

Franchise fatigue finally setting in then?

Less domestic business and increasing costs probably contributed as well.

For some reason, Fast and Furious series really popular in China. In fact, the 1st and the 2nd highest grossing foreign film in China is 8th and 7th FF film.

China really loves those movies.

The last Transformers movie would have been a complete bomb if China didn't save it in the first week. Sure they abandoned it the following week but still they were clearly excited for it during the first week.

Also helped Pacific Rim: Uprising from totally bombing too.

Seriously foreign markets have become safety nets for these movies. If it doesn't do well here, the combined profits from all over will prevent them from becoming complete failures.

Actually, that's not entirely true.

Already successful films can gain additional large profit from Chinese box office, but to count on it as a safety net would be risky for two reasons.

1) This is because they take so much from the box office revenue. The usual calculation is that past the first 3 weeks of release, theatres take 50% of the total box office gross, hence the whole "have to gross twice the budget to break even" equation. That's the North American market. In global, the theatres/distributors take much more, but China? Hoo boy, the film companies can expect to receive about 30%.

2) Chinese film audiences nowadays gather more towards to the domestic films, judging from how there are many more Chinese films that break past $400 million nowadays. This is both from Chinese film production becoming larger in scale (though can't necessarily say the thing about actual quality) and very strict screen quartering by Chinese government.

tl:dr - American films' share of pie AND the sheer size of pie in Chinese box office in general is getting smaller.

Of course, there are exceptions, but there still gotta be a whole lot more exceptions before it can become a more reliable rule.

A Quiet Place has opened extremely well, while Blockers also opened to pretty good numbers. Ready Player One is also holding pretty strong.

It currently has the fourth highest opening for a horror movie of all time (the only bigger openings being Paranormal Activity 3, Hannibal and It).

edited 8th Apr '18 12:13:33 PM by comicwriter

I should pay more attention to the box offices of horror films. Seems like nowadays outside of the large franchise films, horror/thriller films are among the most profitable.

What we're also seeing over the past few years is that not only can the make a lot of money, but there is a definite place for horror films outside the sub-five million dollar Bloomhouse films. In general, I think there is a strong place for mid-budget R-rated films that is largely going untapped at the moment.

edited 8th Apr '18 6:34:39 PM by BigMadDraco

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle pushes ever onwards.

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=jumanji2016.htm

Total Lifetime Grosses Domestic: $403,641,093 42.5%

• Foreign: $546,000,000 57.5%

All that from a production budget of 90 million dollars. There are people who must have turned that film down who are pig-sick about that fact. The film isn't just in profit by any estimation, even my usually gloomy ones, but it's almost ridiculously in profit.

Where did they go right?

Well, it was moderately entertaining (I watched it on an airplane), and it had zero competition due to TLJ having less legs in January than everyone expected.

It's a combination of name brand recognition, a Minimalist Cast with big name actors (Johnson, Hart and Black are each seen as outright bankable, while Gillian has her fans too) with their charisma on full display, good action with great physical comedy and a promotional campaign that faithfully represented it.

"Where did they go right?"

You know, this phrase amuses me, simply because I don't hear it that much.

But yeah, TLJ underperforming definitely helped. Of course, TLJ grossed past $1.3 billion so it's not like it wasn't a massive success or anything. But if it was the powerhouse in the scale of TFA, it would've affected this movie pretty badly.